- Joined
- Mar 7, 2016
The times I have dealt with PHE have always been awkward. For my work at least they were fairly stingy with samples and wanted someone from the team I'm on to head over there to do research (rather than just sending samples to us, which can be done safely as low-risk delivery, we've done it before in fact!). I wasn't aware that this weird centralization effort is also happening with CoV-2 too, since my lab was apparently working on testing too, but that might be due to us having strong links with the NHS.
It's strange though, surely with all the freed-up labs there'd be a large effort to make use of this space to increase testing capacity? Though it could also be because CoV-2 requires CL3 labs and those aren't anywhere near as common as your typical CL2s and CL2+ labs.
The thing to remember is Public Health England is a gubermint Quango usually filled with the kind of twats that hate anything private sector related as it might let in the door of capitalists or somesuch bollocks. They've got big shiny labs they want to use and rather than treat this as the exceptional circumstance it is, they'll no doubt be worried some bright spark defending his salary and post will try and flog those labs off for "efficiency savings". So they hoard it like a bastard to make themselves the sole, key lynchpin in the whole Corona-chan debacle.
We should be using the enormous private testing capacity the UK has, especially at a time when there's bound to be lest testing required on hair products and any other consumer chemicals shit at the minute ongoing.
The fact we're not, entirely at Duncan Selbie's behest, is the big ass problem right now.
Heck, there's a lab here in Pillockville and I know half their staff is off from the lack of bloody work.